This past Friday, LeBron James announced his return to Cleveland after four years of displaying his talents at South Beach. One of the biggest clues that something was in the works was when the open letter written by Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert in 2010 to the then-departing LeBron suddenly went missing from the team’s website. In the letter, Gilbert had lashed out angrily at LeBron for leaving the team, calling the move to Miami a “cowardly betrayal.” Gilbert also made fun of LeBron’s nicknames and boldly [and wrongly] predicted that the Cavs would bring home an NBA championship trophy before the Heat.

So when the scorned team owner’s letter suspiciously disappeared in the days leading up to LeBron’s decision, radio talk show hosts and talking heads alike were abuzz with conjecture that a deal with Cleveland was in the works. Ultimately, this speculation turned out to be true, with LeBron announcing on Friday—via a very well composed article on SI.com—that he would be returning to Northeast Ohio with the hopes of improving more than just the basketball team’s performance.

As we head into the July 4 weekend, your EntertainHR sports reporters cover America’s favorite pastime–litigation!

The women who cheer football got a boost this week when the Oakland Raiders announced they would pay their Raiderettes the California minimum wage of $9 per hour beginning this coming season. This blog first covered the story back in January when the lawsuit was filed. We would not be surprised to see similar lawsuits from other cheerleading squads, particularly in California or other states with employee-friendly labor laws. The attorneys for the Raiderettes who filed the lawsuit will continue to pursue their action against the team. They seek back pay and attorneys’ fees for the alleged violations from past seasons.

The women who play football have filed a lawsuit of their own. A class of current and former players in the Lingerie Football League–now the Legends Football League–have sued the league in Los Angeles superior court for a litany of wage and hour violations based on the league’s alleged misclassification of them as independent contractors and not employees. Employee misclassification is a hot topic in employment law and has been the reason for a blitz of wage and hour class actions in recent years. The U.S. Department of Labor has devoted an entire section of its website to the topic.

When Karlesha Thurman got ready for her college graduation ceremony, she probably had no idea that she would be picking up international news coverage along with her accounting degree. Thurman’s three-month-old daughter became hungry during the festivities and Thurman did what countless other mothers have done–she nursed her hungry baby. A friend snapped a photograph of the moment and Thurman later posted it to Facebook in an effort to show that breastfeeding is “natural, it’s normal, there’s nothing wrong with it.” Thereafter, the photograph went viral and added further fuel to the widespread debate on public breastfeeding with supporters pointing out that it’s natural and healthy for babies and critics arguing that it should be kept behind closed doors.

The public breastfeeding debate has even inspired a new form of civil disobedience–the nurse-in. If you’re not familiar with the term, participants band together to nurse in public in a particular location at a particular time to show their solidarity. Some nurse-ins also include participants handing out pamphlets and other educational information about breastfeeding. Despite public health organizations and others trumpeting the health benefits (for both mothers and children) of breastfeeding, public breastfeeding remains a source of controversy and disagreement.

Remember when the study of genetic information was deemed to be the purview of those in the medical field or reserved for films and television shows that were classified as “futuristic science fiction”? Not anymore. Today we live in a world where everyone is fully aware that their own genetic code and family history could be easily obtained, analyzed, and dissected, along with the sheer paranoia that comes with that knowledge.

This awareness is the result of extreme technological and medical advances and their dissemination, and accompanying commentary, through articles, blogs, and anything else that resides on the Internet. If that’s not enough, just turn on the TV or go to the movies and you’ll be inundated with characters being persecuted because of their genetic makeup.

If you are a Mary Poppins fan, as I am, you were probably as excited as I was to check out Saving Mr. Banks, which is based on Walt Disney’s long-time efforts to bring Mary Poppins to the big screen. As chronicled in the film, that proved to be quite the challenge given that the author, P.L. Travers, (after having Disney jump through hoops for 20 years to win the film rights) was prone to such antics as insisting that Disney eliminate the color red from the film and avoid any type of animation. If you are paying close attention, you may also notice some interesting details in the film, including its subtle treatment of Disney’s smoking habit.

Disney, who ultimately succumbed to lung cancer complications, was a chain smoker for much, if not all, of his adult life. However, he was careful not to smoke around children, and there is a studio-wide ban on smoking in Disney films. In Saving Mr. Banks, you will see some hints to this habit in Tom Hanks’ portrayal of the animator and producer. More specifically, Hanks stubs out a cigarette in one scene and there are also references to Disney’s incessant cough.

For those entrepreneurs who have struck it rich thanks to the Internet, Al Gore’s invention has been a wonderful thing. But a news story last week illustrated that the Internet also can cause a lot of headaches–even for the same people whose children and grandchildren may never have to work a day in their lives because of the worldwide wealth created by the worldwide web.

This story comes to us courtesy of the Internet payment processing giant, Paypal. According to Paypal, the company’s former director of strategy, Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal, responded to an offer to take on a new role at the company last week by “choosing to turn a career-defining moment into career-destroying infamy.” Specifically, “Rocky” responded to the offer by inexplicably posting a series of angry, profane, and bizarrely nonsensical tweets on Twitter. Those tweets that were actually comprehensible included suggestions that Paypal executives perform physically impossible feats that best not be described here. Those tweets that were less decipherable included messages such as, and we quote, “jjjjj 999 I’mk nokkkkkiikkknokkkkkiikkkkkkjjnmo88iok99okkoolooolo.” Rocky has since claimed that his tweets were meant to be private (oh, THAT explains it) and has apologized, but Paypal isn’t buying what he is selling–probably even if he offers to accept payment via Paypal.

Lately, have you felt feverish, light-headed, even giddy? Well then you must have Oscar fever. The stars! The gowns! The teeth! My god, those blinding white teeth! For you, March 2, 2014, was a night of luxury, glamour, and take-out noodles because NO WAY you were cooking for the family and risk missing J-Law stumble over something walking down the red carpet. Adorbs!

You don’t have to try very hard these days to find employment law references in pop culture. Movies and TV shows examine issues of employment discrimination, politicians seem unable to resist the urge to text photos of their private parts to their disgusted subordinates, and professional athletes provide ample fodder for lawyers in desperate search of HR blog topics. But when’s the last time a major news story emerged about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA? Now it is true that HIPAA made the news when it was initially signed into law by President Clinton, because (to greatly oversimplify) it served the laudable goal of guaranteeing continued health insurance coverage for employees who change jobs, without regard to preexisting conditions. But since those initial kudos, publicity about HIPAA has been about as hard to find as a day of calm weather in the American winter of 2013-14.

That all changed last week, when the CEO of AOL, Tim Armstrong, publicly blamed unpopular changes to the company’s 401(k) policy on costs AOL had incurred because of two employees’ “distressed babies.” Specifically, Armstrong stated that AOL had to enact the new policy because, in part, “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born, that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost.” Suddenly, every pundit and commentator in the country became a HIPAA expert.

I’m not shy about going back to the well. Last month I posted some lessons HR professionals could take from Billy Beane’s roster management of the Oakland A’s, as told in the bestseller, Moneyball.

For my money, Beane’s innovations as GM of the cash-poor A’s put him in the upper ranks of baseball executives among the likes of Branch Rickey, who first made use of an organized farm system to grow talent for my beloved St. Louis Cardinals (before he went on to sign Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers). Now that Brad Pitt has played him in the theaters, people from all walks of industry are clamoring for a bit of Beane’s mind, and personnel managers have been at the front of the line.

If you have to ask why, look around you right now. You are probably reading this on a digital display set into a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. That device is tethered to the ether (likely through your employer) where a server down the hall, in Seattle, in Bangalore, or who-knows-where is making a little record that you, my poor reader, lingered over my humble musings.

Five minutes ago, it also noted the nasty joke you forwarded to a buddy in another office, and it saw that your buddy (not as good a friend as you thought) felt that your joke warranted HR’s attention and sent it to his office HR rep. If asked, the server holds a map of the 16 times in the last three months you’ve crossed this line, and is just waiting for someone to call up this information that will twist the knife you’ve stuck in your own back. (If you’re wondering what it knows about all that stuff you’ve been copying to the used one terabyte hard drive you bought online last week, well … let’s just say you don’t want to do that anymore.)